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Search Engine Optimization

Everything you need to know to improve your organic SEO in the most ethical way. Easy to understand guides and tutorials on how to better optimize your website both onsite and offsite to make your website traffic grow.

While I rarely recommend using tags on a website - I cannot say enough about how important category pages are! If you are a newer blogger on Wordpress or are kind of confused about all the options - this guide on managing post archives may be helpful.
By utilizing your category pages you can gain SEO benefits and give your readers the best experience which in turn can improve page views and time on site which can all help your overall search engine rank.
Why Your Category Names Matter
This ... READ FULL ARTICLE

What Is Keyword Cannibalization?
Keyword Cannibalization is when you have 2 or more pages fighting for the same keyword or keyphrase.
While this is not a new issue it is one that is coming to the surface because of the changes in the search algorithm related to content optimization.
Why Is Keyword Cannibalization A Bad Thing?
When Google comes to crawl your website and sees these multiple pages being optimized for the same term it is forced to choose one that seems to best represent the ... READ FULL ARTICLE

If you have been affected by a content scraper or are scared of having your content stolen by a content scraper - this article is for you!
You know those websites - the ones that take your content without your permission and post it on their own websites. This can happen manually - or via a scraper which utilizes code to pull in content - but either way there is potential for this content to be harmful to your ranking.
Now before you get too paranoid - it is actually rare that a content ... READ FULL ARTICLE

We have written before about the Search Console in some of our how-to SEO guides and are absolutely thrilled that we were finally able to get some access to the new version that has been launched! There has been a lot of talk on Twitter about the wonderfulness that is the new Search Console -- and now is time to share some of the highlights!
We will do a more in-depth look at the Search Console in the future, but for now we will be sharing the most important features that you can use to ... READ FULL ARTICLE

One of the most common questions we get asked is "what tools do you use for SEO". Usually we start that answer with "well the tools we use are mostly enterprise and can be costly"!
Not really what people want to hear.
The cost of some of the tools we use - even at the lowest price levels are usually prohibitive for smaller organizations and businesses, but having access to some sort of SEO tool is not an option anymore - it is really a necessity.
Which is why we wanted to talk about ... READ FULL ARTICLE

At 2 Dogs Media one of our most popular services is our website audits - and it is one of our favorite things to do because we feel it is the one singular thing we can offer to a website owner that can make the biggest impact for them fairly quickly.
If you are wondering what a website audit is - it is an evaluation of a website that can offer a lot of insight in terms of technical, onsite and offsite SEO strategies and where there are gaps to help you improve your growth and ... READ FULL ARTICLE

We have seen so many discussions lately on a variety of groups and forums and wanted to create a general guideline that we will hope clarify how to manage your Wordpress posts in regards to categories, posts and other archives.
Overview
What Is A Category/Category Archive?
Categories are used to group your content into a "main topic", for example if you are a car blog you may have a category for each car manufacturer. The goal of categories is to help your readers find the content they are ... READ FULL ARTICLE

A meta description is text within your HTML code that is sometimes returned in the search engine results. It is a summary of what your page content is about and is typically about 160 characters. This little bit of text can affect your organic traffic results so it is important to write great meta descriptions that encourage users to click your result over your competitors.
META DESCRIPTIONS - THE BASICS
What does a meta description look like to searchers?
In the image in the right you can ... READ FULL ARTICLE

There has been a lot of chatter about a big update that Google recently put out which has been nicknamed "Fred" by Google's own Gary Illyes.
Now - it is important to remember that Google is doing updates all the time --- but if there is one that is creating a lot of chatter in the SEO world, then we want to make sure you know about it!
This update is based on results website owners are seeing in their traffic and rank - mostly from forums that cater to black hat SEO techniques like Black ... READ FULL ARTICLE

Nofollow links are a website owners way of telling search engines that they are not to use a link they are creating to influence the ranking of the website being linked to. It is basically like a "vote" and while you may want or need to link to the website - you do not necessarily "vote" for them to be considered important.
It is important to note that there are 2 different scenarios regarding this topic:
Outbound links from your website to others and then Inbound links to you from other ... READ FULL ARTICLE

So AMP this - AMP that, we have all been hearing about this AMP stuff but still do not really understand what it is or how it can help your website.
Well, we have a short case study that we hope will enlighten you as to why you should implement AMP. A special thank you to Carol at Fidose of Reality for being our "guinea pig" for this and allowing us to show her data so you can see the impact AMP can have!
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a general overview to give you an idea of what CAN happen if ... READ FULL ARTICLE

Having a secure website not only gives your visitors a sense of security as they browse your content, it can also help in search results since Google has stated it will use it as a rank signal. Although there has been no clarity on how big an impact - we expect it will grow as a signal as the web continues to evolve, but right now we do not think it is a huge impact based on what we see with our own websites and clients.
It used to be that in the past only e-commerce websites or websites that ... READ FULL ARTICLE